Re: [latinreq] Paper sizes?

Hi Tony,

On 1/5/14 6:30 PM, "Tony Graham" <tgraham@mentea.net> wrote:


>Would it be useful to have a section on conventional paper sizes?  Perhaps
>under the 'Trade' section?  Not really something you'd want for an EPUB, I
>know, nor really all that useful for someone printing to an A4- or
>Letter-size printer from their web browser, but might be useful for
>someone wanting to go to a paper book.

Paper sizes for book printing depend on the manufacturing process, and on
marketing. We use several dozen different sizes, but it's probably a
different collection of sizes than an educational publisher, or a STEM
publisher.

I'm not sure what we could say about paper sizes, other than to list a
bunch of them. Most production systems I'm aware of let you define
arbitrary page sizes, and also have presets for common sizes. Page size
certainly influences design, but again I'm not sure what information we
could provide.

>
>Alternatively, you might suppose that someone designing for a Publisher
>would be told what size to design for and that anybody else could do what
>works best for them.

In my line of work, the trim size and page count are often known before
the book is written. It's an external input into our production process,
driven by marketing and financial considerations. The same considerations
apply even at the smallest scales. I've printed and perfect-bound some
books by doing a crude imposition onto letter-sized paper, printing
duplex, cutting the sheets in half, and then binding and trimming the
results. So 5.5 inches x 8.5 inches made sense given those constraints :)

>
>I don't know that you'd want to get into discussing signatures and
>imposition, though there is an oblique reference to signatures in "The
>nature of printing and binding also mandate that the number of pages in a
>book be some multiple of eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages." in "Book
>optimization" [1].  (FWIW, that section refers to trade publishing but
>isn't in the trade publishing section.)

I'd be very happy to declare imposition out of scope! I just wanted to
mention page count as an external constraint which an advanced automated
system might need to take into account.

Thanks!

Dave


>
>Regards,
>
>
>Tony Graham                                   tgraham@mentea.net
>Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
>Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
> --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
>    XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming
>       Chair, Print and Page Layout Community Group @ W3C
>
>[1] http://w3c.github.io/dpub-pagination/#book-optimization
>
>


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Received on Monday, 6 January 2014 22:07:39 UTC